


Survivor's Guilt (The S33R KNOWS B3ST Remix)

by gumbridge



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Dreambubbles, F/M, Ouroboros Remix lightning round
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:35:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gumbridge/pseuds/gumbridge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not really goodbye forever, you know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survivor's Guilt (The S33R KNOWS B3ST Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Survivor's Guilt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/208050) by [anonymousComrade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousComrade/pseuds/anonymousComrade). 



> Thanks to Roachpatrol for running the remix challenge, Artillie for the beta/reassurances, and of course to anonymousComrade for having written a fic that was so much fun to pick at like this.

Terezi feels cold: terribly so. She has "just enough slitherbeast blood", she sometimes liked to say, relishing the feel of the sibilants against her tongue, to never have felt much by way of chill in life.

She is cold now.

She is in Karkat's hive, Karkat's hive as it was before his computer exploded, before Terezi got her hands on it in Pulse and Haze. It is small and squat, a hive constructed well to the shaky specifications of a squeaky wiggler. Such hives still feel claustrophobic to her, the walls too thick, leaning in over her, pressing down.

She wishes she could do this by Trollian, back in her own high airy hive, but if her Witch is correct, no other time and place will do.

Terezi takes a further step into the main hall. Her shoes are very red against the flat grey of the floor. The scent assaults Terezi's nose, cherry jam on the slate saltiness of cured seabeast flanks. There are no sounds from upstairs: at this hour of the night, Karkat will still be in his recuperacoon. _Should_ still be in his recuperacoon, if he'd managed to get himself into it at any wee hour of the day.

There are sharp noises from this floor, from just around the corner. Terezi slides into the cookblock – more flat walls, a single set of windows above the urn-cleansing depression, a thermal hull against the other wall. Closed cupboards everywhere; it all smells clean, of spotless counters and fake vegetation-scented cleaning fluid. The noises are clearer in here, chitterings and chatterings, and Terezi remembers Karkat's lusussprite.

His lusus sidesteps into view past the open doorway and Terezi takes a step back, involuntary caution at the spikes of hard meringue white screaming _danger Troll Robinson._

The lususbeast cocks its head at the noise and she can smell it spotting her: its spine curls over further, its jaws gape, its claws wave! It is quite threatening, or would be, if Terezi did not have her canes all stashed within easy reach in her sylladex, if Terezi were not beyond all threats now.

But she does not want to have to deal with this clawbeast lusus, and as she should now, theoretically, be beyond all illusions, she admits: she does not want to cause Karkat any harm she does not have to. She will never wax black for a Vantas.

So she simply takes half a step forward, reaches out, and pushes over the thermal hull. Her claws dig into its chitin and when she dodges out of the way of its falling bulk she finds purple on her fingers.

The lusus chitters so loud after the crash, anger and warning and worry for its charge. It skitters forward, back, jostling its scarred white shell against the slick purple of the hull. There are noises coming from upstairs now, dull thuds, muffled thumps, muted invective.

Karkat Vantas clatters down the stairs, bleary-eyed, drying sopor still crusting his cheekbones and eartips.

"The roe cubes are right there in the thermal hull, crabdad, why the hell do you need me—to—"

He stops.

She smells him seeing her, his focus sharpening: he tenses up, stops himself on the penultimate step, fumbles a sickle out of his sylladex. It isn't the one he had at the beginning of the game, nor is it the one he had at the end; it's something simple, queue stacks in bright wiggler's colours. Terezi thinks he accidentally launched it out of his own modus at some point prior to the game? She had never been clear on just how he'd managed that.

"Who are you?" he asks. His voice is high and tight, and fear smothers even the smell of the sopor on him. Terezi cannot be sure but she thinks he is looking right at the caste insignia on her shirt! She is a little too blue-blooded for most trolls' comfort. Karkat's own insignia is boring grey, like licking a wall.

"I am afraid you will just have to remember that on your own," she tells him. She wants to tangle her hands in her hair, she wants to gnaw on the hook of her glasses.

His eyes narrow. He takes one more step down. One to go, and he's clutching at the railing, eyes popped out wide again like clambeasts in the fire. He takes a breath and it hitches in his throat, sticks in his pulmonary air sacs.

"GC," he says, awkward on his tongue like a new flavour, like a fallen tooth, something foreign in his mouth that he doesn't know what to do with. "I—I thought you lived in the inner-continental forests?"

"Really," says Terezi. She makes a little noise like a sigh, quiet and calculated and terrible. "I thought you'd be a little further along than this. Try to remember, Karkat."

At first, he appears – absurdly – affronted at her presumption, then worried, and finally when she says his name, something in him clicks: he seems a little more awake, a little older. He totters down the final step and raises a hand to touch it to his shirt, delicate, right in the middle of his insignia.

Right in the middle of the spreading dark patch. The one surrounding a deeper, darker slash.

He sinks down and there's no stair to catch his fall, just the deep tone of the landing platform where they were meant to claim their prize. Terezi hastens forward and is fast enough only to slow his descent; they end up in a heap on the floor, Terezi's arm pinned under Karkat's bony spine, the thick smell of untrollishly red blood coating her sinuses.

Karkat's eyes are rolled way back in his skull: Terezi frowns, and lifts up her free hand to slap his cheeks, once, twice, neatly symmetrical.

Karkat rouses. His hands push hers away, weakly, and his shirt is soaked. Terezi turns her face down his and says, quietly, "You need to wake up."

His eyes lock on hers, where hers are under her durable plastic lenses. There's pink, welling up at the edges of Karkat's eyes, and if Terezi has any knowledge of this boy then it's not for his own remembered pain.

"You have to wake up," she says again, scratchy voice as firm as she can make it. She makes it sound like a seer's prophecy, a general's command. She pulls her arm out from under Karkat's torso. Her hand is entirely red, like she's wearing one of her Redglare gloves, thick-smelling like a vat of tomato soup.

Her nostrils flare.

"You've got to wake up," she says, a third time, the clanging of a bronze door shutting, death toll knelling. "Not that I don't know how you like to sleep in, Karkat! But Feferi says it's important, and I don't know why, but she's been really insistent about it."

And that seems to be the charm. Karkat struggles to lever himself upright, elbowing Terezi on his way up. He's built thick, shoulders broad and hips solid, but he never eats enough: he's almost as sharp as she is, at some of his edges.

"Feferi's here?" he asks, and there is a terrible hope in his rough voice, an excitement she will hate to quash. "What about the others?"

"They are all here! All of them. Even Eridan is here somewhere. This is where all the dreaming and the dead ended up, Karkat!"

She can just smell his mind going, the slimy machinery of thought turning over in its casing.

"So we're in the dreambubbles," he says out loud, and Terezi nods. "And you said I need to wake up." She nods again. Her face has gone stone-grim, she can feel it in her muscles. "So why don't we all wake up? Why just me? We can do it together, we beat the black king together, we can beat the demon together."

"You need to clean out those oversized aural headflaps of yours," says Terezi. "Do you use them for storage maybe instead of listening? _You_ need to wake up, Karkat. Not me, not Feferi, not even all the Aradias stuck here."

Karkat opens his mouth again. Terezi _shushes_ him firmly, and he closes it maybe only out of shock at the pale presumption. (Terezi Pyrope is not pale for him, not for Karkat. She simply employs any methods at her disposal, which Karkat ought to know by now.)

"We – I – can't go with you, Karkat. Can't, not don't want to."

He frowns, not understanding or not wanting to understand.

"Why not? Even if the others are here because they're dead, we survived the other Jack's attack. We should be able to wake up and make some kind of plan to beat him back!"

Karkat's eager, bright and blazing, and the corners of Terezi's mouth twist. "You're misinterpreting me again, Karkat," she says. "Possibly deliberately! It is getting a little old, and dreambubble physics notwithstanding, we are not made of time, o leader mine. I was the Seer of Mind! And you are the Knight of Blood, which should give you some hint as to the reasons for your continued survival."

The light in Karkat banks, ebbs. "I don't – Terezi, that's ridiculous, why would I survive a stabbing if our Witch of Life couldn't handle one asshole troll with a concupiscent grudge."

"One shanking is an entirely different game from an explosion of white science to the gut, and we both know it. Besides, her Imperial Purpleness didn't exactly get a chance to build up immunity to it, mister oh-no-stabbings-are-how-he-says-hello Vantas!"

"Don't be ridiculous," he says, desperate.

"Don't be _deliberately obtuse_ ," Terezi shoots back. "You are alive and I am not. Thank SGRUB and its ineffable mechanisms for that! Feferi says you and you alone have the chance and ability to defeat Jack. The fates of two universes and four aliens ride on this and you being stubborn as a barren four-legged kickbeast is not going to help any of them."

"Fuck them," says Karkat, eyes wide and wild. "Fuck the human aliens, fuck the cancer-ridden corpses of our two corrupt universes and sessions, fuck Jack and the Scratch he rode in on. It's not fair, Terezi, it's not fair to me or you or anyone _and I don't want to leave you_."

"You're not going to have a choice soon enough," Terezi points out. "You could wake up at any second. If I wanted to check I could probably find out exactly when! Being a seer has its perks, just like being the hero of blood. The perks are not always very pleasant but they are something we all just have to _deal_ with."

"Everyone I – I care about is dead," Karkat says. His voice is bleak and grey and flat, like salt, like the floors. "All my friends, Terezi. Even the troll I'm – I'm as fucking red as my own freakish blood for."

Terezi stares down at her bloodstained palm. It _is_ awfully red. "There is probably the kernel of something very romantic in that," she says, aiming for conversational. "Probably."

And she reaches out and pulls Karkat towards her; she nestles his skull in the hollow of the space between her shoulder and neck. Her bloody hand finds its way to lie on the crown of his head, grey and red almost buried by his coarse black hair.

Her t-shirt becomes patched with damp in short order. Terezi's own eyes are dry, but they feel heavy, and aching, and very, very old.

"The humans need you," she says to one of his horns. She doesn't even have to worry about him doing her any worse an injury than a bruise if he turns his head too fast. It's odd.

"Fuck the humans," he says, buried in the threadbare weave of her shirt. "Fuck them in every freakish alien orifice they have. Fuck them in any new orifice any iteration of Jack should happen to give them. Fuck them with the unholy writhing flagella of the largest, slimiest, and most distasteful horrorterrors. Fuck them with the universe-spanning star-spangled cancerous cock of Bilious grubfucking Slick himself, and then fuck them a little more, extra, just for me."

"You don't mean that," says Terezi.

"No," Karkat says, and emerges from the cool, tear-dampened hollow of her shoulder. His hair is mussed, spiking around his horns, and the skin under his eyes is darker than ever. "Guess I don't. But that doesn't mean that this is not all the highest degree of hoofbeastshit. Troll Angus Prime hoofbeastshit."

"You would need a hoofbeast the size of a hivestem to shit the amount necessary for this situation," agrees Terezi, fake-solemn like it will save her. "Who knows? Maybe you will end up making a new, non-cancerous universe filled with such creatures, and one day you will be standing under one, and you will look upwards to its enormous lactating udders, and its proud tail lifting to let it take a shit all over the dusky young landscape, and you will think: yes, this is just like that one time I cried into Terezi Pyrope's shoulder until all she smelled was hot cherries until the end of time."

"Don't even pretend you don't like it."

"I am getting off on it as we speak!" Terezi says, and adds in a cackle. It isn't very convincing.

Karkat scrubs at his face with his hands, sleeves pulled up over his wrists. He sniffs, and the sound is entirely pathetic. Terezi's skin feels too-hot and prickling where she and Karkat touched, and too cold everywhere else. She is intimately aware of the flow of her blood.

Terezi takes off her glasses. She folds their arms neatly, left over right, and tosses them up high enough for her sylladex to catch them on their way down.

She puts her hand on Karkat's wrist. It's fever-warm and wet with tears, and more than a little gross.

Karkat looks up. His eyes freeze when they hit hers. She can't blame him! The white of her own dead eyes is tickling even her own nose with its vanilla-pepper.

"We'll always have dreambubbles," she says, and leans in to kiss him.

His lips are hot and chapped and hers are cold and thin and somewhere in the middle are their tongues. Karkat shivers against her and Terezi has no idea if it is from the change in temperature or his tiredness, or maybe he is swooning like a character from one of his own terrible films!

It isn't a very good kiss. It's slow and tired and more than a little awkward, and they barely draw any blood. Karkat's red fades too fast to desaturated nothing on Terezi's tongue.

Terezi pulls back. "I think it's time for you to go," she says, so low, into his ear. And when he doesn't move back immediately, she bites it, right where the skin is thinnest.

Karkat moves back then, jerking away and smelling of lemon-sharp shock. He puts a hand to his ear. His nails are torn and ragged at the edges, the orange of them peeling and gnawed.

His eyes are as round as suns but his forehead is accordion-scrunched, eyebrows a fold away from meeting.

"It isn't forever," says Terezi.

"It's not the same," says Karkat. He smells wrecked: shirt damp and crumpled, face patchy and stained. If Terezi licked his cheek she would taste nothing but despair.

The scent of him is fading, starting in the middle.

"Kick Jack extra hard for me," Terezi says. She settles her spine straight, and folds her hands together in her lap.

"He is going to rue the fucking day he crawled out the distended heaving sphincter of whatever squalid mother grub it is that birthes carapaces." Karkat's face tilts up, towards where the Green Sun burns, even in dreams. "Terezi, I think I'm waking up."

"As you should be!" Terezi stands up and hauls him to his feet. His thick wrist feels wrong under her hand, the sensations weirdly not crisp enough.

"Karkat," she adds. She feels naked without her glasses on. "Karkat. You're the most pitiful troll I've ever met."

Karkat startles at that. He lays his other hand on top of Terezi's where it sits on his arm.

"Pity you too, Terezi," he says. "More than anything."

And they stand like that, heads bowed and hands clasped, body temperatures flattening out to lukewarm where they meet, until Karkat's gone.

Terezi breathes out, long and slow, as the shared dream crumbles around her, leaves her in her own respiteblock in her own hive, memory of a night from sweeps and sweeps ago.

Her hands are cooling again now, now that there's nothing left to warm them. Her skin prickles with it, complaining at the cold, grown too used to the heat.

Terezi Pyrope is six sweeps old, and she will never get any older, and she is tired.


End file.
